Kalevi Jaakko Holsti (born 1935) is a Canadian political scientist. Kal Holsti and his elder brother Ole were born in Geneva, while their father Rudolf served as Finland's ambassador to the League of Nations. Following the outbreak of World War II, the Holsti family was unable to return to Finland, and instead settled in the United States, where Rudolf held a visiting professorship at Stanford University. Kal and Ole lived with the families of Rudolf's Stanford colleagues after he died, as Liisa, their mother, had been hospitalized since 1943 with tuberculosis.